Why not become a lifetime supporting member of the site with a one-time donation of any amount? Your donation entitles you to a ton of additional benefits, including access to exclusive discounts and downloads, the ability to enter monthly free software drawings, and a single non-expiring license key for all of our programs.

You must sign up here before you can post and access some areas of the site. Registration is totally free and confidential.

Its not a secret that windows clipboard tool is primitive one for dont support many features such as to retreive older copy/paste, no history in windows. So which one is better to manage in optimum way this exercise.

The answer to your difficult question may be that this is depending more on the user than on the clipboard. As an example, I have Snagit 9 installed, and it may be the most advanced clipboard you can have, but... I don't use it! It is not to my liking. There may very well not be any "The Best Clipboard" unless you specify your needs very precisely.

When I looked, I found ClipMate the best, and I've never seen anything to give me any cause to reconsider.I found Dittoto be the best free program at the time, and would be very interested to know if anyone thinks there a a better free alternative to it now.

I'm personally pretty satisfied with ClipX - simple, unobtrusive, to-the-point, freeware, and suits my needs. Only problem I've had with it is that sometimes OpenOffice locks up if ClipX is enabled and you copy/paste stuff in the spreadsheet app.

'Behold! It is not over unknown seas but back over well-known years that your quest must go; back to the bright strange things of infancy and the quick sun-drenched glimpses of magic that old scenes brought to wide young eyes.'

When I looked, I found ClipMate the best, and I've never seen anything to give me any cause to reconsider.I found Dittoto be the best free program at the time, and would be very interested to know if anyone thinks there a a better free alternative to it now.

ClipMate and Ditto are both "clipboard managers" or "extenders", but I think they have very little in common. Someone comfortable with one may find the other unhelpful.

I suppose the free alternative to ClipMate is Mouser's Clipboard Help and Spell. Both are great if you need to categorize your clips, but in my experience the price for this is some encumbrance in accessing individual pieces of text.

Ditto is awesome if you don't care about categories, but just want to bring back previous clips with minimum keypresses (and no mouse). The instant incremental search really shines, especially in that it works transparently with substrings (while ClipMate scans only from the beginning of the string IIRC). It is probably not too helpful with non-textual content, e.g. images, but if you write a lot and use a lot of repetitive phrases, Ditto might be the one to try.

On edit: I only wish someone would recompile Ditto (C++) to remove the networking feature and to enable choosing font for the incremental search display - the text at bottom is entirely too tiny for my 40+ eyes.

I too mostly use ArsClip, but sometimes CHS, and I have licenses for ClipCache Pro and for Clipmate. It's possible to find an old free version of ClipCache on the Web, but current versions are payware.

ha14, I think it depends on how many features you want, and how accessible you want them. Mostly, I only want to retain clipboard history for a while, and have it deleted on FIFO basis. ArsClip is great because it makes that basic usage easy, while the advanced features are still readily accessible on the rarer occasions I need them. Some of the others put maybe too much emphasis on the advanced features, rather at the expense of usability of the basic ones.

Not all support things like RTF formatting, so you may have to try several to find one that suits you well. I see that Visual Clipboard Pro supports Unicode - that isn't universal, either.

Mostly, I only want to retain clipboard history for a while, and have it deleted on FIFO basis.

This is true for me most of the time, and ClipMate makes this very easy. But even though most of my use of ClipMate is pretty routine and I don't have many clip collections, I'm glad I can store some Spanish phrases in a separate collection that is easy to access but separate from the rest of my clips. Also, I value very highly ClipMate's "powerpaste" feature; this permits me to take a bunch of clips and paste them into a document in sequence just by hitting CTL-V. While ClipMate has many features I don't use, I don't feel that they weigh down the program. I find it on the whole very responsive and easy to use, while offering me features that I'd miss in a more minimalist program.

I'm happy to recommend my own Clipboard Help and Spell, but most clipboard tools do the basic stuff pretty well; i'm finally getting into doing updates for CHS, so if you have feature requests be sure to let me know (on a different thread!).

As someone who uses text clips (not images) quite intensively, I can recommend this combination:

mouser's CHS Clipboard Help and Spell. This is an excellent text-only clipboard assistant, with some unusual and useful features. Fast and efficient, and also recently updated.

hamradio's KK KlipKeeper. Though this partially duplicates CHS' database of clips, it is a handy backup for the paranoid, and it also enables ready access to fast searching of the clips saved, via the FARR search line.

The AutoHotKey script in the Quote box below. The script by default gives an unformatted paste on Ctrl+V, and a formatted paste on Shift+Ctrl+V. The formatted paste only works on the last Copy action to the clipboard (I think any older text saved in CHS or KK is saved without its fomatting properties).

I have also tried these free clipboard utilities, but have not exhaustively trialled/tested them:

ArsClip (Very good). Saves images and text.

ClipGuru (Very good). Saves images and text, and gives extensive source details for every clip. Has some features not always found in other clipboard assistants. The web site says they have gone away. The last free version I have was v2.8.0, and if you want an installation file for it, you can download it from here.

Quote from: Ampa on Today at 19:50:16Please Mouser, can we have a way to integrate FARR and CHS?(Cross link to previous threads asking similar things)

Funnily enough, I was thinking only today that if there were an additional feature that I would like to see in CHS, it would probably be the option/ability to search for a character string using the FARR search box (i.e, same as KlipKeeper).

KK has a useful thing in the shape of the ability to search the klips for a character string using the FARR search box. It's very fast. By comparison, though CHS has more functionality and is pretty sophisticated, I have sometimes found it to be a bit tedious to find an old clip in CHS, whereas it pops up real fast in the KK/FARR search. (e.g., kk +sall string)

For 1. if I type "test" the highlight bar moves to first item starts with 't' then first item starts with 'te' and it follows.For 2. [win] key must be supported particularly.For 3. I normally use 3 different languages (Englisg, Simplified Chinese and another language)For 4. Something like what is provided by mouser's programFor 5. I mean I can choose a text from the clip list and tag it as a fav item and the fav list is undisturbed by normal copy action but has its own hotkey to bring it up.For 6. I have program which requires characters to be feed like typing instead of 'paste', I wish I could define a list of program such that when I am pasting a clip, the string is "type" instead of "paste" to them.

If anyone knows a clipboard assitant program that can do all the above, please kindly post it in this thread! Thank you!